URLs du Jour

2017-05-28

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Proverbs 25:6-7 has advice for those around royalty:

6 Do not exalt yourself in the king’s presence,
    and do not claim a place among his great men;
7 it is better for him to say to you, “Come up here,”
    than for him to humiliate you before his nobles.

Know your place, peasant.

■ Awwww. Ben & Jerry’s Bans ‘Same-Flavor Scoops’ in Australian Same-Sex Marriage Push.

Declaring "love comes in all flavors," Ben & Jerry's said Thursday it's banning its Australian customers from buying two scoops of the same flavor of ice cream until same-sex marriage is legalized across the country.

OK, fine.

Meanwhile Unilever (which owns the Ben & Jerry's brand) continues to quietly peddle Chunky Monkey in China. Like Australia, there's no same-sex marriage there. And unlike the Aussies, China features plenty of political, ethnic, and religious repression, torture, and disappearances.

And I don't know what the current obtainability of Cherry Garcia is in Cuba, but Ben & Jerry's was a longtime active supporter of "engagement" with Cuba. And Unilever is building a "soap and toothpaste factory" outside Havana. Again (like Australia) Cuba has no same-sex marriage. But (unlike Australia) it also has no journalistic freedom, and plenty of arbitrary inprisonment and repression.

Just two examples. I await some cute stunt from Ben & Jerry's to highlight Cuban or Chinese tyranny. But—guess what—I will not be holding my breath.

■ KDW@NR answers your unasked question about the randomness of terrorism: Terrorism Is Not Random.

The Venn-diagram overlap between the world’s Muslims and the world’s terrorists may be small, but it is not trivial, and the confrontation between the Islamic world and the West puts a cold light on areas of concern beyond political violence. In the Islamic world itself, we see a heritage of high culture and great civilizational achievements, but a great deal of it looks like Karachi at the high end and rural Yemen at the low end: violent, backward, cruel, and uninterested in progress to the extent that “progress” is synonymous with Westernization — which, multiculturalist pieties notwithstanding, it is. Even if you set aside the propensity of certain Muslim fanatics to bomb pizza shops and to name public plazas in celebration of fanatics who bomb pizza shops, there’s still a lot of real life as lived in Afghanistan or Egypt that just isn’t going to fly in Chicago. In places such as Minneapolis, we have done a fairly poor job integrating the relatively small number of Muslim immigrants we already have.

Mr. Ramirez also comments:

[Political Correctness]

■ A Bloomberg column from Ramesh Ponnuru looks at Hillary Clinton's recent speech at her alma mater, Wellesley, where she recollected her 1969 commencement address: Clinton, Trump, Nixon and Those Liberal Blind Spots.

Ramesh is especially taken by HRC's use of "we" to describe the campus climate. Example: "we were furious about the past presidential election of a man whose presidency would eventually end in disgrace with his impeachment for obstruction of justice." Cute! Among other objections:

That use of “we” refers to the Wellesley community as a cozy liberal monoculture. It erases any conservatives, or Nixon or Trump supporters, in the graduating class. Which is a little rich considering that she also decries the idea of “a closed society where there is only one right way to think, believe, and act.”

Today's progressive mindset: they're "inclusive", as long as certain ideas, opinions, facts, attitudes, and philosophies are excluded.

■ Sad news from Heat Street's Jillian Kay Melchior:Twitter Under Fire for ‘Misgendering’ Millions of Users to Advertisers. Some users griped that they were incorrectly pigeonholed! Millions? I doubt that. But in any case, Twitter issued groveling apologies (and a mystifying array of options) to the offended But:

That’s not enough for many of its critics, who say the company has caused them emotional trauma by assuming people’s gender. “Hey, Twitter, it’s bad enough that you enforce a false gender binary, but actually misgendering folks is egregious rhetorical violence,” one user wrote.

Yet another case of calling something "violence" that wasn't actual violence. The real damage here is to clear thought.


Last Modified 2024-02-02 4:51 AM EDT